


NON OMNIS MORIAR

by gleed



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Slavery, ah yes i call this fic: hadriana is the scum of the earth, changed the description because the other one was eh, honestly this is basically a product of how much i CANNOT STAND hadriana, sub-par at best tbh, there's also a suggestion of mouth STDs so avoid if you're uncomfortable with that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 12:02:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5868691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gleed/pseuds/gleed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was blood between his legs then, and everywhere else. There was blood carving through the surface of his skin like rivers and roads and contour lines on a great, wide map. His body had been claimed like the land – the colour of soil, and trampled on as though it were.</p>
            </blockquote>





	NON OMNIS MORIAR

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in an hour and didn't edit it, please forgive me for any obvious mistakes

_You are no better than the blood drying between your legs._

He used to question that, that statement, that concept. Between his legs? Why is blood there? In what state of mind is he in that he lets it dry there, that he doesn’t think to move to a washroom and clean himself off. He did not understand then, though one day he would.

Leto learnt a lot between those long years; once he was of the sun, he became of the nothingness in the dark, and eventually he was Fenris. Someone he didn’t know. Someone he’d not always been.

There was blood between his legs then, and everywhere else. There was blood carving through the surface of his skin like rivers and roads and contour lines on a great, wide map. His body had been claimed like the land – the colour of soil, and trampled on as though it were.

He lay for days, his head hurt, his eyes remained facing the top of his skull. He was in the dark, and it was cold and smelt heavy and unfamiliar, and he felt something crack against his thighs every time he moved. When his hands weren’t so locked he reached downward, ghosted his shaking fingertips against the crust of blood there.

When he mumbled, “ _Blood between my legs.”_ he wasn’t quite sure what it meant, or why that felt so familiar to his lips. His skin screamed, his lips swelled; he made no more sound.

He heard it again, when he could see, when the darkness bled away and the hands of strangers peeled him of grime. When he was laced into leathers and his hair was pulled away from his face.

“ _You are no better than the blood drying between your legs_.” said the main with the dark eyes and the white hands. He wrapped those white hands around two gaunt brown cheeks and whispered in awful tones, “But you are not such a lowly wretch as those others slaves. I put good, hard work into bringing you here…you are not a dog. Not like them. A wolf, perhaps – more befitting of someone like you. _My_ wolf.”

The man’s mouth made a two syllable shape, and Fenris was named. He focused on the _fffff_ at the beginning of the name. Thought of the other words that started with that letter. _F_ riction, _f_ ighter, _f_ ire, _f_ alling.

It wasn’t always blood that he was compared to.

“You’re like rotting meat.”

Hadriana was swiping Fenris’ food from his hands when she spoke to him, only a lump of bread in her hands, but a meal worth three days for Fenris.

“You’re dangerous and you’re worthless and only flies want you.”

That wasn’t strictly true.

As ominous as it was stomach churning, Fenris knew he was wanted. Only by roaming eyes and cold hands and cruel words. Master Danarius was a powerful man, Fenris was blood drying between his own legs.

He was aware of the dirty looks other slaves gave him, when he was raised from the straw covered floor he slept on, taken from the rooms that smelt of blood and semen and faecal matter. He wished he could scream, that each eye that fell upon his back was informed. He wanted to explain that the soft bed he was being permitted to spend the night in would serve as nothing other than a buffer, something for him to bite onto, something for him to bleed into. It would not be a surprise if he were stowed onto the floor when Master decided he was satisfied.

Fenris was held by the neck and every other area that Master could prize a hold, and he felt more in that moment than in any other that he was not worth the blood drying between his legs – not the blood, not the semen, not the bruises.

Master had taught him to be ashamed of the whore he had not chosen to become. He was trained into submission and reception, and then slapped were his eyes to stray to the other slaves.

Most of the time he wasn’t looking at them out of lust, or even aesthetic appeal, but just out of interest, curiosity, trying to figure out if he recognised them. Every time he thanked the serving girl for bringing him his meals, Hadriana would tell Master that he’d been speaking inappropriately to the female slaves.

He would promptly be retrained.

There were two exceptions:

The elf girl who worked in the gardens, with skin like polished ebony and glassy grey eyes. The back of her cranium pink and white and grey with raised scars from the knife that took away her hair in thick, twisted coils. Fenris remembered being there when the man scoured a blunt knife over her head and watched it drip like molasses, like her tears like the light from her eyes and her lips and her fingertips. She sat amongst the flowers in spring now, and ripped off the heads of the dead ones, looked at them as though she wanted to slip the dried petals between her lips, to make herself pretty again. Although Fenris couldn’t think of a girl prettier.

A knot of braided black hair had been dropped at his feet once.

“I would have done the same to you. Consider yourself lucky I think your hair makes you prettier white.”

Fenris didn’t know what Master Danarius had meant by ‘prettier white’.

Another exception:

The elf boy who carried the bread to the kitchens, who had eyes like honey and a wave of shiny red hair – and a chunk ripped out of the length of his right ear. Fenris had been there too, when the boy had collided with a wall of crockery and watched the plates smash, and the noise had echoed for what seemed like years and years stacked atop each other. The cook wielded his meat cleaver like Fenris did his sword and the boy was pressed to the floor and the cleaver sliced into his ear. He still passed him, although his grin was no longer white teeth like polished ceramic plates and red lips like dried rose petals on his mouth – but hard cracked lines and grizzled corners and gums filled with sores.

Master Danarius dragged the kitchen boy to Fenris’ quarters once, held him by the collar and forced his lips apart with cruel white fingers.

“Do you know why he has sores here?”

Fenris had nodded. He knew what magisters liked to do with their slaves’ mouths.

“And you’re lucky, aren’t you? Because I don’t give people sores.”

Fenris had nodded again.

He was reassured that were he to look at any other slaves like _that_ again then he would have more blood drying between his legs.

Hadriana liked to make Fenris work for his food.

“Alright _dog_ ,” she had a clay bowl of broth in her hands and an awful look in her eye, “Fetch me an apple and I’ll let you have your dinner.”

“Mistress Hadriana, the apples are still in the trees during summer.”

“Then pick one from the tree you idiot.”

“It’s cold and dark outside, Mistress – “

“ _I. Don’t. Care._ ”

Hadriana rammed her heel onto Fenris’ barefoot. She was a full foot shorter than Fenris, but she held herself like she could tower over him.

It was dark in the gardens, and the grass was cold beneath Fenris’ feet. The apple trees were at the back of the gardens, apples were a slave’s fruit, they couldn’t be grown near the oranges and plums and lemons.

The only reason Hadriana ate them was so she could make the slaves feel like they were having yet another thing taken from them.

Fenris found an uncertain grip around an apple tree trunk, and crawled into the branches. He was nimble, but he couldn’t cope properly in the darkness. He wrapped his fingers around an apple and crashed to the ground. His back hit the soil and made a noise like the slamming of a door when Master or Hadriana were angry.

He meandered back to Hadriana’s quarters with a hand against his spine.

“ _Idiot_.” she hissed as soon as Fenris handed her the apple. “It has a hole!”

She turned the red side of the apple, held it up to Fenris eyes. There was a small hole.

“That means there’s a maggot in there. You got me a rotten apple!”

“It was dark outside, Mistress.” Fenris defended, “I couldn’t see what the apple looked like in the gardens.”

Hadriana’s hand cracked against Fenris’ cheek like a break of thunder.

“Don’t talk back to me, _slave_.”

Fenris scowled.

“I fetched you your apple as best I could.” Fenris said, “May I have my food now, Mistress?”

Hadriana made a face like Fenris had sworn disgracefully at her, and she upturned the bowl of broth over Fenris’ head.

“You’re not worth the pig fat they cook this gruel with.”

Fenris wiped the salty broth from his eyes, smoothed back the locks of hair that were clumping together. He licked what little had fallen to his lips away in a mocking swipe and said,

“And the blood?”

“What?”

“And the blood between my legs, Mistress.” he didn’t break eye contact with Hadriana, “Am I worth that?”

“…No.” Hadriana grabbed Fenris’ shoulder in a clawed grip and forced him towards the doorway, “The only reason Danarius cares about you is because he spent good money on making your skin look pretty. If you could remember a thing about who you really are he’d have you lynched in a second.”

“Who I really am, Mistress?”

“Get out.”

“Mistress Hadriana, I’m not sure I understa – “

“GET OUT.”

Master Danarius liked to play tricks with Fenris’ brands. The lyrium reacted like flickering candlelight to his magic. He found entertainment in watching Fenris squirm.

He liked to press his hand between his shoulder blades and push energy through his palm. Fenris’ tattoos would begin to glow from the centre, they would grow out in a soft blue haze like the blooming of a flower. Master Danarius would press again, and a second wave of light would pulse physically through both his markings and veins. His cry would creak out of his throat like an old floorboard, because he knew if he screamed he would be slapped, or kicked, or strangled until he stopped making noise.

It made his skin hum; he could feel the vibrations even in his teeth.

When Master Danarius left, Fenris would crawl to the corner of his small, cold quarters, and drag his tunic over his head. It was thin and the linen was blood soaked, but it made him forget what laid beneath, what coursed through his skin.

“ _Nothing more than the blood between my legs_.” Fenris would smooth his hands down his thighs to settle the lyrium. It stung the worst there, it felt like a dull knife being driven into the muscle. If it went too low his knees would grow weak, like all his bones would disappear, and if it went too high it felt like he was being kicked in the testicles. There was no place that it didn’t burn like fire.

“Don’t give him any bread.” Hadriana had dragged Fenris by the ear to the kitchens once. She confronted the cook in her grey apron and stained blouse and threw Fenris at her like a ragdoll. “Tell the serving elves that he isn’t to be fed anything until he passes out from hunger.”

The cook nodded, but she also asked,

“Why, Mistress?”

“That’s not for you to know.” Hadriana clipped Fenris’ ear with a scowl, and stormed from the kitchens in her familiar stomping feet, furrowed brows way.

Fenris went hungry through that entire day.

He sat cross legged on the cold stone floor of his quarters that evening, when a knock came to the door, and he opened it with a bowed head and his eyes cast to the cracked stone.

“Evening.”

The red haired kitchen boy had a board in his hands, and three fine slices of bread lay atop it. His scarred mouth was twisted closed, though the ugly heads of several yellow-red pustules spilled out from between his gums.

“Cook said you weren’t to have any bread but…” the boy held the bread towards Fenris, “You looked really tired when Mistress Hadriana dragged you into the kitchens I – here, just take it.”

Fenris scooped the bread from the board and held it to his chest. His stomach roared like an angry beast.

“Thank you.” he muttered, and began ripping the crust from the bread, eating ravenously.

“You’re welcome.” the kitchen boy said, “Don’t tell a soul.”

Fenris nodded his head, mouth full of bread.

Fenris did not see the red haired kitchen boy again.

Hadriana kicked him in the shins when she found out he’d taken the bread, curling her lip and clenching her teeth. Fenris knew he would have bruises upon bruises, but it was hard to be scared of a woman whose crown barely reached his chin.

“I still don’t understand why you denied me of my meals, Mistress.” he insisted through pained hisses and the wobbling of knees.

“Because – _because!_ ” she lurched forward, pressing Fenris against the wall. Her hands were planted heavily against the stone, one either side of Fenris’ head. “You are so _infuriating_.”

“I fail to see how your opinion solicits a beating and starvation.”

Hadriana released one hand from the wall, pummelling her fist into Fenris’ cheek. She split the skin, and blood leaked into the creases on her own, painting her knuckles red.

“Say my _name_ when you talk to me, slave.”

“I apologise.” Fenris spat, “I forgot how much you loved the sound of your own name, _Mistress Hadriana._ ”

Hadriana’s hands took Fenris’ shoulders like weapons, and she pushed him down to the floor. She slapped the open wound she had left on Fenris’ hollowed cheek bone. She took his wrists and pressed them against the wall above his head, so hard that the stone began to cut into the soft flesh. She dug her heel into Fenris’ groin and pushed hard.

“You’re infuriating and you’re stupid and you’re _not worth the blood drying between your legs_.”

 

++++++++

_When Leto was young he tripped and cut both his knees. The gravel studded patterns into his shins and blood ran down his tiny legs in crimson rivulets. He had sat, and drawn his legs to his chest, and cried. The courtyard continued to bustle around him, but two women stood from the wash basins and ran to his side._

_Varania sat behind him and pulled his tiny body in her lap. She pulled gently on the tip of his ear and cooed at his bubbly tears. Mother’s brow creased, and she knelt before Leto, drawing his tiny face into her brown hands._

_“Now, now, my darling.” she reached into her old apron and pulled out bandages. She ripped two lengths and wrapped Leto’s tiny knees. She hummed gently. Leto didn’t recognise the song. Mother frowned at the trickles of blood that carved paths down his shins, beginning to dry between his legs. She wiped them away with the corner of her dress. “Don’t let the blood dry between your legs.”_


End file.
